Educational Science

A Cockroach Crawled Inside a Woman's Ear, and It Can Happen to You

Another day, another story about an insect crawling into a person's ear and making itself at home. Katie Holley, a Florida resident, woke up in the middle of the night to a weird sensation in her ear, like someone had placed a chip of ice in my left earhole, she...

Butterflies Remember Caterpillar Days

The metamorphoses that caterpillars undergo rank among the most radical transformations in the animal kingdom. So it's rather amazing that a butterfly or moth can remember things from its caterpillar days. Amazing, but true, a new study finds. The broadly held view of what happens during metamorphosis is that the...

Cold and wet conditions have ruined California's butterfly season and could contribute to some species disappearing from the state altogether. It has been the worst spring for butterflies of my 35 in California, said Art Shapiro, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. There will...

Here's Why Cockroaches Can Survive Just About Anything

The genome of the American cockroach has been sequenced for the first time, revealing why these creepy-crawlies are such tenacious survivors. The roach (Periplaneta americana) has widely expanded gene families related to taste and smell, to detoxification and to immunity, compared with other insects, according to a new study published...

Advanced Optics ... on Butterfly Wings

Long before engineers sought to create microscopic devices that manipulate light for electronics, known as photonics, Nature had developed animals that reflect light with smaller and more complex structures than any manufactured by man. New research shows that the wings of the morpho rhetenor butterfly reflect its brilliant blue colors...

Scientists Create Butterfly Hybrid

Researchers have created a hybrid butterfly whose genes and color are blends of two other species. New species typically arise from the branching of one species into two, but in the July 15 issue of the journal Nature, scientists report the first clear evidence that evolution in animals can work...

Billions of Butterflies Descend on California

Heavy winter rains have led to billions of butterflies that are beginning to descend on California in what could be a record migration. Millions of butterflies that flew into the Central Valley in the last week of March could be just the advance guard of an unprecedented hoard. This may...

Butterfly's Navigation Secret Revealed in Flight Simulator

The monarch butterfly is known to use the angle of sunlight as a navigational guide on its annual fall migration from across North America to Mexico. But how it processes the information has been a mystery. Now scientists have used a flight simulator and peeked inside the butterfly brain to...

The Secret of Bright Butterfly Wings: LED Technology

Science was way behind nature in developing LED light technology, a new study finds. The beautifully colored wings of African swallowtail butterflies manipulate light using engineering tricks similar to those found in digital displays. The butterflies have black wings with bright patches of green and blue, which they use to...

Female Cockroaches Sync Up Their Virgin Births

Female cockroaches don't need a mate to lay eggs, but they do like company. New research finds that virgin female cockroaches housed together are quicker to produce offspring than virgin females living alone. It isn't particularly pleasant to imagine this happening under the fridge, but female American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana)...